Steve Morgan sorts merchandise at the Amazon Fulfillment Center in San Bernardino. The online retailer is slated to open a fifth California warehouse in Redlands. (Photo by John Valenzuela/San Bernardino Sun)

Workers prepare the future Amazon Fulfillment Center in Redlands on Aug. 14, 2014. It will be the company's fifth in California. (Photo by Micah Escamilla/The Sun)

Rather than compete with Amazon, small-time sellers of everything from phone accessories to paddle boards are teaming up with the e-commerce giant to take advantage of its sophisticated shipping infrastructure.

Fulfillment by Amazon, or FBA, stores and ships third-party sellers’ items directly to customers for a fee that is only marginally higher than it would cost sellers to ship the products on their own.

As a result, startups increasingly are turning to Amazon to handle the back end of their businesses.

“FBA has been a blessing for us because it has allowed us to really focus in on driving sales,” said Joseph Jaconi, co-founder of Tech Armor, a Redondo Beach startup that sells mobile phone and tablet accessories.

Tech Armor launched in 2012 and sold 89 units the first month. Today, the company is the No. 1 seller of tablet screen protectors on Amazon and has sold a total of 4 million units, 3 million of which were ordered this year.

Jaconi attributes Tech Armor’s success to quality products and robust customer service, which includes a call center in Oregon and employees in India who provide email support in 10 languages.

But Amazon’s ability to handle massive volume has helped Tech Armor accommodate explosive growth. On days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, sales have spiked to 26,000 in a 24-hour period.

“I couldn’t imagine the headache we would have if we had to do that on our own,” Jaconi said. “During the holidays it’s just absolutely crazy, but they come through each and every time.”

Amazon also brings near-instant gratification with its free two-day shipping for members of its Prime subscription club, which helped the company capture nearly $75 billion in net sales revenue in 2013, roughly a quarter of the entire U.S. online retail market.

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The online retailer also announced Thursday that it will open its fifth California distribution center, in Redlands in October, increasing the company’s footprint in the state to 5 million square feet, or the equivalent of 87 football fields.

Amazon displays and handles payment for products from 2 million third-party sellers, accounting for more than 40 percent of the items sold on the site.

But it won’t disclose how many sellers use FBA, only saying that the number grew by 65 percent in 2013.

Sellers also are flocking to FBA to gain access to Amazon’s tens of millions of Prime subscribers, who receive free shipping only on products sold by Amazon or by FBA-certified sellers.

“If you’re not a Prime product, a lot of customers don’t consider your product,” said Stephan Aarstol, founder and CEO of Tower Paddle Boards, based in San Diego. “If you don’t have Prime, you’re not reaching Amazon’s best customers.”

Aarstol made a splash in the paddle board industry when he started buying boards from Asian factories and selling directly to consumers at a heavy discount.

The company did $3,000 in revenue when it opened in 2010 and $270,000 its second year. Tower started listing its products on Amazon in March 2012 and, by the end of the year, sales hit $1.7 million. This year, the company is on track to clear $5 million in revenue.

Aarstol was careful not to give Amazon too much credit for his success as most of his business still comes from search engine marketing and because “great products” are “ultimately how you’re going to grow a business.” But Aarstol knew from his experience with previous e-commerce companies that Amazon represented a “huge channel” filled with “people that are fanatically Amazon loyal.”

When Tower boards first went on Amazon.com, about 180 other paddle board products were for sale.

“All of a sudden, we had 25 percent of the paddle-boarding stuff on Amazon, which ... is power, just by being there.”

Amazon sites received 160 million unique U.S. visitors in July, according to comScore, an online marketing and analytics company. Seventy-two percent of all people who visited at least one retail site in July visited Amazon at some point.

As Amazon increasingly becomes the default destination for online shoppers, sellers’ rankings on the “everything store,” as founder Jeff Bezos calls it, can be as important as their ranking on a Google search.

Amazon’s algorithm analyses several factors — including customer reviews, price and shipping reliability — to determine which products appear at the top of search results. Sellers who ship with Amazon get an automatic bump in the rankings because their packages rarely go missing or arrive late.

Amazon spokesman Erik Fairleigh declined to comment on all the factors that contribute to a product’s ranking, calling the algorithm the company’s “secret sauce.” But he did confirm that Amazon does not prioritize its own items over those of third-party sellers.

A seller’s best bet for competing with Amazon is to offer a unique selection that the site doesn’t have, said Jennifer Becker, co-founder of BabyHaven.com, a baby clothing and accessory company with a warehouse in Santa Fe Springs.

“We try to find the product before Amazon stocks it,” Becker said. “You have to play around what Amazon retail is doing.”

Becker started selling electronics on eBay when she and her twin brother, Jason Becker, were still students at Crescenta Valley High School. While she was at Cal Poly Pomona and he was at Cal State Long Beach, they founded BabyHaven.com, which did $600,000 in revenue its first year.

The company sold $20 million worth of product in 2013 and is on track to increase that figure by 50 to 70 percent this year, Jennifer Becker said.

Last year, BabyHaven opened a brick-and-mortar store in Glendale to keep its vendors happy.

“They say that if somebody wants to test the stroller out they need a physical location,” Jennifer Becker said. “Even though what we’ve found is that they come in and look at it — and then they buy it online.”